It's weird. In a year that seemed to be wider open than usual, Best Picture and Best Director line up 5 for 5 for the first time in...decades? In my predictions, I guessed the more typical 4-4 match, but I was thinking there was a very real possibility of only 3-3.

Remarks: The Best Actress category was one of the toughest for me. I had four solid guesses, but the fifth could have been anywhere. Interestingly, it went to Keira Knightley, which was someone I had considered and counted out.

Howl's Moving Castle in the Best Animated Feature category is the most welcome surprise, resulting in a completely non-CG lineup of nominees. I like CG animation, but Hollywood's been grotesquely over-eager to abandon the more traditional forms, which can still tell certain types of stories in the best way. This is a satisfying blow to that trend. And issues of medium aside, it's *still* nice to see a smaller, more visionary film beat out the slapstick nothings from the big studios it was competing against.

"Star Wars" ousted from the Sound and Visual Effects categories by Narnia? Come on!! Narnia was a good film, but it was not technically innovative -- and it shouldn't be showing up anywhere near the Makeup category, which is where Star Wars scored its lone nomination.

The highest budgeted Picture nominee is Munich, at $23 million. That makes this year's line-up favor the (in)dependents even more so than 1996, when Jerry Maguire was the only studio film and big moneymaker in the group (The English Patient won that year).

18 out of the 25 nominees in the directing and acting categories are first-time nominees, and most of the remaining 7 are second-time nominees and/or have never won before. I agree with Joel Siegel, who said this morning that the torch has been passed to a new generation of filmmakers. For now, that is. Next year, it could easily go back to the veterans. Nonetheless, it is significant to see the industry reaching so far outside the money and the traditional favorites.